The New York Times detailed years of aggressive tax evasion by President Donald Trump in its bombshell report. It seems obvious based on the numbers, including the fact that he paid no federal income taxes whatsoever in 10 of the last 15 years and that he paid just $750 a year in both 2016 and 2017, that Trump might have crossed a legal line. But that is missing the point.
The real scandal isn’t whether Trump cheated his way out of paying millions of dollars in taxes — it’s that our tax system is designed to let rich people like him avoid paying taxes without breaking a single law. Trump may have taken tax avoidance to an extreme, but these schemes are far from unique among the ranks of the ultra-rich. To them and the politicians they donate to, this kind of tax avoidance is a feature, not a bug, of our tax code.
Read Full Article »